You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice.

The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach.

Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.īut what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. He was rich because other people did things for him. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. “The Sun King had dinner each night alone.

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley